Tick-Tick-Tick

A few minutes after telling me about his childhood reoccurring dreams, Stephen remembered having fever hallucinations as a child. I've never heard of anything like this. I had a fever hallucination once as a child, but the hallucination was completely visual (to the best of my memory,) and it only occurred once, when I was running an extremely high fever and was almost near hospitalization.

Stephen's fever hallucinations were quite different. Apparently, they occurred before, as apposed to during, his sickness. It also occurred, not once, but an estimated half-dozen times. I would say it happened frequently enough to consider it a condition rather than just a coincidence.

I use to have fever hallucinations. It wasn’t when I was sick, because I've looked it up on the internet and stuff since, and read about your temperature goes up really high, and it can make you go crazy. But when I was a kid, I have no idea why, but when I was going to get sick... before I got sick, when I was... my body was, I guess fighting things, but the symptoms hadn't really materialized, so I would maybe start to feel a little bit under the weather, but I wouldn't show a fever or anything like that, I would have... I would go kind of crazy.

I never lost my faculties. I would never loose sense of stuff, but reality would mess up. I think this is one of the reasons I've always avoided drugs and psychotropic whatevers and anything... Even at the dentist, when they put me on laughing gas, I stopped inhaling it because it made me nervous just to be... to be not in my right mind. And I think it's because, at least in part, I got so freaked out when this would happen to me. And it happened to me, probably, half a dozen times throughout my childhood.

But the biggest thing that would happen is I would get hypersensitive to sounds and light and different things. Usually sound was the worst, though, because I'd lie in bed and set up my... I had this little cute yellow alarm clock that my parents bought me to wake myself up in the morning, and it was analog and it would... you know, the little hand would tick-tick-tick throughout the night.

At this point, we had to stop the recording to focus on parallel parking the car. After an excruciating ten minutes of driving back and forth and back and forth, we were comfortably in our parking space, and Stephen resumed his story.

So, because this little alarm clock was analog, it would make a tiny little tick-tick-tick noise as it went, and I went so crazy one night, with this thing, that... You know, I could have just pulled the batteries out. It wasn't even a plug-in clock, but I was so out of it and so weird and overwhelmed with the senses of it, that I just kept trying to bury it. Like I wanted it to... not just not be on, but be far away from me.

So, I buried in my sock drawer, and I could still hear it from my bed. Wasn't even that loud of a thing, but it was just this little tick-tick-tick noise I heard as a Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Which I don’t know how is physically possible.

The rustling I made in my own sheets... I had to lay perfectly still or else I would go crazy. But eventually... I wrapped it in socks. I buried it in the bottom of my sock drawer. Eventually, I had to take it out into the hallway and put it in the hall closet to be far enough away that the thundering noise of this little tiny second hand clicking wouldn't keep me awake all night.

And any time this use to happen, the only way I could get to sleep would be to crawl into my parents' room and sleep on their floor. It was so weird. I don't know why. I would tell them what was going on... I... My dad snores. I don't know how this worked out, but somehow just being close to them... I don't know if it just helped cement my grip on reality or what the deal was, but I could only sleep... I would just bring in like a pillow and... I don't even know if I brought a blanket. I would just throw a pillow on their floor and just fall asleep.

Hasn't happened at any time anywhere resembling my adult life. Just happened when I was a pretty young kid, but... I went nuts. Not, you know, running around the house nuts. Not screaming and crying nuts. Just really felt like I was disconnected from reality nuts.